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Michael Podhorzer

@Mike_Podhorzer

Oct 25

Have you heard that even most Latino voters support Trump’s mass deportation plans? That’s because of what I call “poll-washing”—using surveys to “reveal” popular support for something the survey-takers don’t fully understand. It’s time for pollsters to poll the policies, not the euphemisms for the policy.

The same surveys show even higher Latino support for a path to citizenship—for the same people Trump wants deported!

Trump and his allies have described their intentions toward immigrants in openly fascist terms. (“Getting them out will be a bloody story.”)

This poll-washing is very dangerous for two reasons:

1) A potentially decisive number of voters (not just Latinos), who would vote for Harris if they knew Trump's actual plans, could stay home or vote for Trump; and
2) Should Trump win, it will appear that he has a mandate for his mass deportation plans.

The shock value of “Latinos support mass deportation” is also exaggerated because of how the category “Latino” is constructed by pollsters.

Compare the NYT chart on the left to one I made using the same survey data (and others for comparison). More important than education, age, or even gender are 1) religion (Evangelical or not), and 2) identity (how important they personally consider their identity as a Hispanic/Latino person).

Depending on which survey you trust, the Latino gender gap is anywhere from 8 points (Pew) to 30 points (NYT/Siena).

But the religion gap is 69 points, and the identity gap is 46 points.

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Michael Podhorzer

@Mike_Podhorzer

Oct 18

We should be alarmed by how unalarmed we are about a second Trump administration.

This race is closer than it would be if more people understood what a second Trump term would actually mean for them. 🧵

Take the New York Times front page coverage, for example.

Comparing the past month of coverage with the same time period in the last two election cycles, the 2024 election has received about half as much front-page attention as 2020, and even less than 2016.

We have more evidence this cycle than last about Trump’s authoritarian intentions—yet those have been consistently overlooked or downplayed.

For instance, no front page NYT coverage of how Trump:

-Said critics of the Supreme Court should be jailed (9/23)
-Proposed “one really violent day” of policing to end crime (9/29)
-”Resorted to crimes to try to stay in office,” per Jack Smith’s unsealed court motion (10/3)
-Sent COVID testing equipment to Putin for his personal use at the height of the pandemic, per Woodward’s book (10/8)
-Said he’d use the same law that justified Japanese internment camps (10/10)
-Suggested using the military against Americans on Election Day (10/13)

Read 5 tweets

Michael Podhorzer

@Mike_Podhorzer

Oct 11

Many are wondering whether the Roberts majority will intervene in the election to “select” the next president, a la Bush v. Gore.

As if they haven’t already intervened repeatedly and profoundly on behalf of Trump—shielding him from prosecution via delays and the completely unjustifiable immunity ruling, and by disabling the insurrection clause of the 14th Amendment.

But, as I explain in today’s Weekend Reading post, as much as we worry that Trump will follow through on his pledge to be a “dictator on day one,” we have allowed Roberts’s “institutionalist” sheen to blind us to the fact that his majority has operated as an unaccountable dictator for nearly 7,000 days now.

Apologists for the Roberts Court say that other courts have also overturned major precedents. But other courts were not specifically installed for that purpose.

Think of it this way: The justices on the Warren and Burger Courts who gave us Brown, Roe, and Gideon did not come out of a multibillion dollar pipeline constructed by civil rights activists, feminists, or indigent prisoners.

But the six members of the Roberts majority DO owe their positions to a cabal of 1) plutocrats, who directly benefited from rulings like Citizens United and Loper Bright, and 2) theocrats, who have a fierce ideological commitment to outcomes like Dobbs and Hobby Lobby.

Moreover, nearly every major precedent overturned by earlier courts were achieved with unanimous or near unanimous rulings, while nearly every one of the Roberts rulings was accomplished with only the votes of the five (now six) Republican-appointed justices.

These plutotheocratic interests fund the Federalist Society, which over the last three decades has literally planned and executed an unprecedented transfer of unchecked political power to its own loyalists.

It’s not unusual for a Supreme Court to rule in favor of the wealthy and powerful. But the Roberts Court has created a ratcheting death spiral for democracy unlike any we’ve seen.

Decision after decision has shifted more and more electoral power to the FedSoc Six’s plutotheocratic sponsors—who in turn used that power to take greater control of Red state governments and purge Republican congressional caucuses of RINOs—which in turn was used to place more and more Federalist Society true believers on the Federal bench, and eventually the Supreme Court.

In short order, the Roberts majority tag-teamed with Mitch McConnell to ensure that the former never faced congressional oversight and accountability, and the latter never needed to secure majorities to accomplish the Republicans’ substantive agenda.

Read 6 tweets

Michael Podhorzer

@Mike_Podhorzer

Oct 1

One reaction to my last post, “Kamala Harris Will Win the Popular Vote,” has been something like, “Duh, but what matters is the Electoral College.”

I’d ask you to consider what it means that we collectively shrug off such an anti-democratic structure as “just the way it is.”

Remember that all the progress we’ve made on expanding American democracy—women’s suffrage, the Civil Rights Act, and more—has been because of people who recognized and fought against legal, but democratically illegitimate, structures.

For the last 20 years or more, the American people routinely insist that the system is not serving them and that they have no confidence in it in general—and the Electoral College in particular.

“Anti-democratic” is putting it mildly to describe many results of how our Constitution is written. Consider:

▪️In two of the last six presidential elections (one third!) the results of the Electoral College overturned the popular vote, and in one instance (2000), that result depended not only on the Electoral College but on five partisan Supreme Court justices swooping in to prevent all the ballots in Florida from being counted.
▪️Five of the six Republicans on the Supreme Court were confirmed by senators representing less than half of the US population.
▪️Republicans have held the Senate majority for five of the last twelve Congresses despite representing a majority of the US population only once in that span.

What’s more, Trump has turned the original justification for the Electoral College on its head.

The founders felt an Electoral College representing the most responsible Americans might be needed someday as a check against popular passions which might someday elect an antidemocratic demagogue.

In practice, it has done the opposite – installing an antidemocratic demagogue the people rejected.

Without this illegitimate Electoral College “victory,” Trump would be a historical footnote today, instead of the asphyxiating, toxic cloud over all of our politics he has been for the last eight years.

Read 4 tweets

Michael Podhorzer

@Mike_Podhorzer

Sep 3

You may have heard that public support for unions “has been increasing”—but you probably haven’t heard just how big a deal that is in the context of the last 15 years.

Since the Great Recession, we’ve seen the credibility of, and approval for, just about every major institution plummet—yet we’ve seen support for unions substantially increase.

Why is this happening? I call it the “fuck yeah factor.”

A lot of us who strongly support unions already have at least some agency in our working lives (like good pay and benefits, the ability to telecommute, and so on). We might read about a successful UAW strike and think, “Yay! Good for them!”

That’s not the experience of most working-class people in America, especially if they do not belong to a union. They and their peers often have little or no agency in their work life—unpredictable schedules, no paid leave, dangerous working conditions, and the ever present threat of being fired at will.

When they see other working-class people like them standing up to their bosses and winning, it’s a game-changer. They don’t think, “Yay! Good for them!” They think, “Fuck yeah! I want that too!”

The “fuck yeah” factor is exactly what scares plutocrats like Musk and Trump the most. It’s the seed of social proof that blossoms into meaningful solidarity and powerful collective action.

As Frederick Douglass famously said, “power concedes nothing without a demand” – and a true “demand” is much more than, say, a preference revealed on an issue poll.

Entrenched power will only respond to demands that are wielded by a countervailing power. For ordinary people, that means collective power.

To be clear, voting is an essential democratic freedom, but it’s not the collective power I’m talking about.

Voting is like going to a restaurant and choosing between entrees on the menu. Collective power is like sitting at the table deciding what’s on the menu.

Read 4 tweets

Michael Podhorzer

@Mike_Podhorzer

Jul 23

You’ll be hearing a lot of speculation about how Kamala Harris might poll against Trump.

But we don’t actually need polls to tell us our chances of beating him!

Whether Trump wins in November depends on what voters think this election is “about” in October. The key to Democratic overperformance since 2016 has been voters who oppose MAGA, but are typically disengaged from politics.

They keep turning out in record numbers to defeat MAGA—but there’s a catch. They turn out IF AND ONLY IF they BELIEVE there is a credible threat to their freedoms from MAGA.

How do we know this? The 2022 midterms were a natural experiment. In battleground states, new voters surged to the polls, and Democrats won. Turnout was even higher in those states than the 2018 Blue Wave election!

But in other states, that didn’t happen. And CA, NY, and NJ—solid Blue states where Dems lost enough seats to lose the House—had particularly low turnout.

Voters there just didn’t believe the MAGA threat would affect them. The election was “about” more “normal” issues like crime and inflation. Nothing that inspires disaffected voters to come off the sidelines.

How do we know that it was the stakes, and not some other factor, that influenced whether anti-MAGA contingent voters showed up?

I’ve analyzed other confounding factors. It wasn’t something unique about the battleground states themselves. There was no one demographic, partisan, or vote history group that drove the higher turnout. Voters of all kinds came off the sidelines to defeat MAGA.

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